Digital Humanities Forum 2011

Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities

Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities was a one-day conference held at the University of Kansas on September 24, 2011, allowing KU and non-KU faculty and graduate students to explore the theory and practice of knowledge representation, broadly conceived, and to showcase their digital humanities projects and methodologies. The keynote speaker was C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. The conference was part of our 3-day Digital Humanities Forum, which included hands-on workshops and THATCamp Kansas.

Scholars utilize computationally-assisted methods to view, analyze, classify, and comment on sources of knowledge, and to illustrate the dynamics between these sources and their commentaries, both current and prior. Knowledge representation–the theory and methodology of modeling knowledge using computer technology–is becoming a key dimension of Digital Humanities. Many disciplines are adapting long-established conventions from the print realm for representing knowledge in digital contexts, or they are developing new ones altogether; these involve visual and textual epistemological models, information design, bibliographic tools, and visual representations. For example, there are established and emerging conventions for the description and display of textual evidence. When only part of a musical, visual, or written text is preserved, conventions exist to supply missing evidence and express levels of (un)certainty, and there are emerging tools and methods to enable and describe the citation of intellectual contributions to electronic texts by authors, annotators, translators, and analyzers. In general, humanists are increasingly evaluating and making use of DH methodologies and projects, as well as evaluating the impact of technology on research in the humanities.